Tinsel

“Basically just throw it on the tree,” says the young woman who narrates a YouTube video on how to tinsel a Christmas tree.  Or, she says, you can just lay it over the branches.  Oh, no!  Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.

Tinseling is not to be undertaken carelessly (thrown) or thoughtlessly (laid).  It is, as my sister Mary notes, an exact science, requiring hours, if not days, of labor to get just right. 

Here’s the method.  Take TWO (2) strands of tinsel and match them evenly.  Then carefully hang the strands over the very tip of a branch, making sure they hang straight, not touching or pooling on a branch below.  Carefully hang TWO (2) strands of tinsel on each tip of each branch until the tree is completely draped. 

When I was growing up, tinsel was made out of aluminum and lead, the lead ensuring that the tinsel was heavy enough to hang straight down.  So, you could hang just one end of the strands over the tips of the branches, twirl the short and long parts between your fingers, and then pinch the twirled part together to hold the tinsel in place.

That strands of tinsel could be pinched together suggests the difficulty in saving tinsel from year to year, which we tried to do.  (In my large family, extra money for tinsel was not always available at Christmas time, so we saved it when at all possible.)   When tinsel was made of pewter or lead (banned in the 60s), it would squeeze together into a big glob; saving it meant carefully laying it out straight (sometimes having to break off the parts that had been pinched together on the tree), then carefully wrapping in newspaper.  But no matter how careful we were, the next year lots of the tinsel would be stuck together.  The labor-intensive tinseling was made even more time-consuming when we had to take time to carefully disentangle and disengage the separate strands of tinsel.  

So why all this trouble to tinsel our trees?  We must have picked up the tinseling from our mother, and I like to think we followed the tradition because her mother, our grandmother, was of German descent.  Tinsel was invented in Germany in 1610, originally made of extruded strands of silver.  People added tinsel to enhance the flickering candles on Christmas trees, a tradition brought to America by German immigrants in the early 19^th century.  By the 1890s, Christmas ornaments and decorations were arriving in America from Germany; by the early 20^th century, Christmas trees began to appear in town squares across the country and having a Christmas tree in the home became an American tradition.  In the 20s and 30s, German eis-lametta (icicle tinsel) was a popular tree decoration.

There’s even a German folk tale that accounts for the tinsel: the Christmas Spider.

Once upon a time there was a poor woman who couldn’t buy fancy gifts for her children or decorations for their tree.  One Christmas Eve, she decorated a tree as best she could with fruits and nuts.  After she went to sleep, spiders came out and crawled over the tree, leaving their webs behind.  When Father Christmas (or Santa Claus or the Christ Child, depending on the version you read) visited the house, he saw the web-covered tree and decided to turn the webs to silver.  In the morning when the family awoke, the tree was sparkling and beautiful.

The German tradition of Christmas trees and decorations continued in America even through two World Wars when many German ideas were abandoned as unAmerican.  But war or no war, Americans were dedicated to their Christmas trees and tinsel – and after.   After WW II, Germany was divided into four zones, one managed and occupied by the United States.  German manufacturers were banned from exporting goods to the US; however, American authorities permitted the sale of toys and holiday decorations as long as they were marked: Made in US Zone – Germany. During the 1950s, tinsel and tinsel garlands were so popular that they were frequently used more heavily than Christmas lights.

It was during the 50s that we were obsessively hanging strands of tinsel on our family’s Christmas trees; the photo shows our family tree in San Francisco in 1954.  I wish I could say that my old German grandmother brought the tinsel tradition and the spider story to our family, but I never heard a peep from her – or from my mother, for that matter, about either one.  In fact, the only German-related family story I know about tinsel is from my youngest sister, Teresa.  She says tinseling is one of her most vivid childhood memories.  Terrified of us and our insistence on perfectly hanging tinsel, she called another sister, Pat, a tinsel Nazi.

Tinsel has fallen out of favor these days for a variety of reasons; no one in our family uses tinsel on Christmas trees any more,  and there are no red boxes of tinsel in the Christmas decoration section of stores, either.  But still that’s no excuse for a video instructing tinsel neophytes to “Basically just throw it on the tree”!  With such a long and storied history, tinsel deserves more respect.

Christmas - San Francisco - 1954